Thursday, April 30, 2015

Juliana Rotich

Juliana Rotich is Executive Director and co- founder of Ushahidi Inc, a non-profit tech company, born in Africa, which specializes in developing free and open source software for information collection, interactive mapping and data curation. Ushahidi was originally designed as a crowdsourced map to track violence after the troubled Kenyan elections in 2007-8 but now it builds tools for democratizing information, increasing transparency and lowering the barriers for individuals to share their stories. Through Crowdmap.com, Swiftly.org and accompanying mobile applications, Ushahidi is expanding its global footprint and making crowdsourcing tools available and useful. She is also an advisor to the iHub in Kenya.

Juliana has worked in the telecommunications and data warehousing industry for over ten years. She is originally from Kenya, with a Computer Science degree from the University of Missouri, Kansas City. She is a Technologist, TED Senior Fellow & MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow. She is chair of the Global Agenda Council on Data Driven Development with World Economic Forum.

She was named one of the Top 100 women by the Guardian newspaper and top 2 women in Technology 2011, and Social Entrepreneur of the year 2011 by The World Economic Forum.